World War I and World War II

When one thinks of the people who won World War II, names such as Eisenhower, Montgomery, Zhukov and MacArthur may come to mind. But some (perhaps) lesser known names had every bit as much to do with the victory as the great generals, names such as Oppenheimer, Fermi, Turing and Donovan.

World War II was a war of great innovation, in technology and medicine, as well as intelligence and military tactics. We'll examine nine such innovations in this book. Each one is still affecting us today, including nuclear power, jet planes, computers, rockets, penicillin and radar.

World War I and World War II are primarily associated with men, whether it be military men (Pershing, Eisenhower, Haig, Zhukov), scientists (Oppenheimer, von Braun, Fermi) or politicians (Wilson, Roosevelt, Clemenceau). But if one looks a bit further, there were a number of women who played an influential role in one of the two wars. They range from soldiers to aid workers to spies to First Ladies to cabaret singers to movie actresses. Ammong the most famous: Edith Cavell, Mati Hari, Vera Atkins, Margaret Bourke-White, Anne Frank, Virginia Hall, Lyudmila Pavlichenko and Leni Riefenstahl.

It was the first major mobilization for war of United States forces since the Civil War. And quite a mobilization it was – 4,355,000 United States forces were mobilized.

The United States had resisted joining what many people considered to be a European war in 1914, 1915 and 1916. Even the sinking of the Lusitania on May 7, 1915 with 128 American deaths didn't prod the public to demand entry into the war. It would take unrestricted submarine warfare in early 1917, as well as the Zimmerman telegram of January 19, 1917 (which revealed that Germany was encouraging Mexico to go to war with the United States) to prod the sleeping giant known as the United States to join the war.

World War I was the first “world war”, in the sense that the conflagration wasn't just between two countries, but between large blocks of countries, intertwined in complex alliances. The model of the entire world being caught up in conflicts would continue in World War II and in the Cold War.

World War I was a testing ground for weapons and ideas that would impact the rest of the 20th century. Sometimes the innovations of World War I were technological in nature – U-boats, poison gas, machine guns, heavy artillery, tanks and battleships were all used either for the first time in World War I, or first used on a wide-scale in World War I. Sometimes, the impacts were from strategy and tactics - trench warfare, convoys and etc. And sometimes the innovation was a political idea. Communism as an actual political and economic system, rather than just a philosophy, debuted in World War I, and would have a worldwide influence until its fall in 1991.